Russia hits Kyiv again after the three-day pause for US envoys expires

Russia resumed strikes on Kyiv after a three-day halt ordered for visits by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Ukraine's State Emergency Service said drones hit the Boryspil and Fastiv districts late on 7 September. Fires started at industrial sites in Boryspil. Seven trucks were destroyed. A logistics compound was struck twice. The Kyiv city military administration declared an air-raid alert and told residents to go to shelters.

Tuesday morning was heavier. CNN reporters in the capital heard explosions. City officials said ballistic and cruise missiles were used and that residential buildings in two districts were damaged. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said people were reported trapped in one block and that fires burned at several sites, including an educational building. Casualty figures were not confirmed in the first hours.

Vladimir Putin had ordered a pause on strikes against Kyiv while Donald Trump's envoys sat with him in Moscow and then with Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. TASS said the pause expired Monday evening. Kyiv Post reported a dispute over the clock. Russian accounts treated the halt as running from midnight Friday to 23:59 Monday. Ukraine's Air Force warned of a jet-powered drone over Kyiv at 20:45 Monday, before that deadline. Fighting outside the two capitals never stopped.

What the envoys actually brought home

Witkoff told reporters the weekend talks showed progress and that three-way negotiations among the United States, Russia and Ukraine could be revived. Zelensky called his sessions very substantive. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said Putin's conversations with the two Americans were frank and constructive. None of the three sides published a ceasefire text, a map, or a date for a next round that would bind air forces. The Friday strike on the Security Service of Ukraine headquarters, the first hit on that building in the war, was the backdrop the envoys flew into.

A 72-hour pause on two cities is a diplomatic courtesy, not a halt to a war. It let the envoys land, take photographs, and leave without an incoming alert in the districts they were using. It also set a timer that Moscow could start again the moment TASS printed the word expired. Kyiv has to treat every such pause as temporary. So do insurers, grain traders and the governments that keep sending air-defence ammunition.

The next useful fact is whether Witkoff's three-way format gets a date. If it does not, the weekend will read as a pause that Russia used to reset strike packages and that Ukraine used to repair what it could. If it does, the Tuesday missiles become the first test of whether anything said in the rooms survives contact with the air-raid siren. Klitschko's trapped residents are the measure that counts before any communiqué.